How to Promote Your Artwork

Promotion as it applies to the sale of watercolor paintings

How to promote your artwork is very important. The more people that know about it the more likely you will find a customer for it.

When you first start out to sell paintings, you don’t often have much of a promotion budget if any. However it is good to know how well an exhibition you have entered is promoted as this will give an indication of how many people will attend. If it is the first time you are entering a show, ask fellow artists who have exhibited there or the show organizers, for an idea of how many people usually attend and how many paintings usually sell along with a average price. There is no use finding out that they sell lots of paintings, if they mainly sell at the $50 price point!

Other ways to promote you work is through word of mouth, let you friends and associates know about your upcoming exhibitions, even if it is a group one.

You can often donate a painting to your local art group for a raffle, and apart from making you feel good, you often get a lot of free publicity from doing this.

The internet is also useful as a promotional medium. If you have a web site (and you should – see my article on web sites for artists and why to have one) make sure you have a notice on the home page of any of your upcoming exhibitions.

Other things you can try are notices to local community papers, letter box drops, notifications to local art societies, people who have already bought your work (these are very special customers as they are most likely to buy more – I even have some that boast how many of my paintings they have bought).

Remember too, that your past customers are always promoting your work. The more work you have sold in a location, the more word of mouth promotion you will be receiving. After I had been selling for a few years I started to get people coming up to me at exhibitions and saying how they had seen (and hopefully admired) my work at a friend’s or colleague’s home. For this reasons I always prefer my paintings to go to homes that really want them, so I never try to hard sell my work! The reason for this is that if a painting is loved by someone they will tell everyone about it. The opposite of this however, is if they don’t like it, they may say bad things about it which is not good!

Now we have done our homework, with the first three of the four P’s of marketing we can look at a price for our painting.

Watercolors Step By Step

My second book Watercolors, Step-By-Step, is now available through Amazon as a paperback and eBook. It is a great follow on from my first book if you have already read that one and would like more step by step demonstrations.